Treyfs and Artknacks

Jonathan Meades

Jonathan Meades has built a career out of seeing things differently — finding the extraordinary in the everyday and sharing his childlike wonder and keen intellect with us so we may also pause and look around, finding for ourselves the fascinating stories hidden in a local colloquialism or in the pattern of brickwork on a shop front façade. He does this through his many short films and television series, essays, newspaper columns, and always entertaining, often challenging fiction, such as his forthcoming epic novel, Empty Wigs, currently crowdfunding at Unbound.

Meades also creates visual art and explains his approach to this side of his seemingly boundless creativity as, “what the French would call en catimini, which is to say on the sly, with no pretensions.

“I take photographs fairly obsessively and I do paint a bit. I started taking photographs in car washes, as one does. You get extraordinary effects. Then I started putting liquids of different colours and viscosity into plastic bags and…